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Thursday, 20 February 2014

Timely Decisions

Recovering from my surgeries and following up on my VHL complications has given me much free time right now and for a foreseeable future. I am anxious to be fully healed and eventually back to work, but for now I've be trying to make the best of the freedom granted. Here's what I've been up to, working, and planning:

As far as my health goes, I've been steadily working to improve it, mostly by working on gaining the weight and muscle I lost in the hospital by eating and exercising. Slowly but surely I'm working toward an acceptable weight, and turning the weight I'm gaining (mostly in the middle gut region) into muscle in my extremities. My hope is to be able to make it through the busy convention at the end of this month.

The other week I purchased my ticket for GottaCon for the last weekend of February/beginning of March. I got myself all registered on their warhorn.net page and signed up for scheduled events. Because of recent events causing me to miss my chance to get a ticket and signup for stuff early, (let alone run my own events) some of the things I would've like to been in have filled up already.

Despite that, it's still a hard decision selecting signing up between the unfilled events that fill each timeslot; there are so many things this year that I want to see/do! In the end I've signed up for events, with secondary selections in my calender in case my whims change. Right now, here's my personal schedule for the con:

Not listed are my secondary choices, along with all the other events too large or spanning multiple slots to schedule.

Around half a year ago, when my friend Jason (who started our much beloved Dresden Files group) moved up north, I ended up with two boxes of RPG books he intentionally left behind. Since then I've kept some of them for my RPG collection, but now the remainder (having double-checked permission as I still partially consider them Jason's) I intend to put up for auction to clear shelf space and maybe make some money at the same time.

Time to clear some space.

I'm also putting up a few non-RPG games that I no longer play like a few boardgames and my old Magic cards. The hard part is choosing how group the items and how much the minimum bid for each should be; I wish to garner interest for gamers to bid on said item. Last year the two items I put up didn't sell; the minimum bid for each might have been too high and/or no one was interested in them (well interested enough to bid at least).

I could group most/all the books as one item, but that risks alienating bidders with books they don't want, so the price would have to be very low (probably near minimum $1) to garner any bids. I'm leaning towards a bunch of low priced lots grouped around theme/system on best chance they'll be taken; here's my tentative list:

My best bud Mike came over to visit a last weekend; we took it easy watching shows and movies, I introduced him to Netrunner, and we played NES games like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: Manhattan Project and River City Ransom (which we beat; one of my favourite NES games: beatin' gang members up and buying food with their money!)

We also swung by a FLGS where I picked up a copy of The Heart of the Wild for The One Ring I had ordered in before I went to the hospital, and the recently released bestiary for Numenera.

Yesterday I also received my print copy of The Day After Ragnarok (Fate Core edition). That combined with two other books gives me plenty of material to digest. Expect a post containing my Impressions of each forthwith.

The other night I finally got back into the local Netrunner scene having missed it for about two months, and I was surprised how many additional players have joined our local meta. Many of them are planning on attending the two Netrunner tournaments Saturday and Sunday at GottaCon. I've considered playing in one or both of the tournaments, but I'm more interested in the RPGs being run around those slots.

Also the game cafe that hosts Netrunner on Tuesday nights is where a championship tournament is going to be held Sunday, March 16th. The winners receive a bye at the Regional Championships, which were just announced to also take place at IBGC, probably sometime in May-July. If I miss out on the tournaments at GottaCon, I'll at least play at this store tournament, if only for the practise and the door prizes, and possible the Regional Championship during the summer.

Finally, I've been spending my spare time working on completing a project before GottaCon so I can showcase it to a couple people at the convention. I'm not ready to post the details online just yet, but here's a teaser photo. Clever readers might know what I'm doing...